Key Interests: Ethical and inclusive software design, good engineering practice, fairness and equity.
The opinions on this Web site are mine, and don’t necessarily reflect the views, policies, or practices of my employer.
Versioning Codable types in Swift apps (without tearing your hair out)
If you work on codebases any larger than a few lines, at some point you will have to deal with data stored in some sort of document. Inevitably, this type will change, and you’ll need to add, remove, and rearrange fields—while still needing to retain compatibility with stored documents in earlier versions of the format.
This is a problem I’ve recently encountered on my side project, Unspool. Even though I’m the only person ever to have used the app, I still found myself iterating on the data structure to make more logical sense—leading to decoding errors and un-openable documents, along with lots of boilerplate that wouldn’t have been sustainable in the long run. (Read...)
Unveiling Unspool
I am pleased to announce the side project I’ve been working on for the past 3 months, and hope to release to the public some time this year. It’s called Unspool, and it exists because I’ve recently got back into film photography and wanted a metadata tagging app that doesn’t make me want to throw things.
I intend to write a developer blog on my experiences building Unspool at least once a month, to give me accountability to: (Read...)
There is no such thing as an apolitical and non-societal discussion
On 3rd March, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp (a company that runs an online project management tool and Hey, a privacy-focused email service) tweeted:
Company culture is not written down, it’s acted out. A company’s culture is a 50-day moving average of how it is, not how it thinks it is, wants to be, or was supposed to be.
Fifty-five short days later, on 26th April, he would publish a long and baffling blog post entitled “Changes at Basecamp. (Read...)
Maybe the real deepfakes were the lies we believed on the way
In 2014, a Tumblr post featuring an implausible anecdote involving a homeless man dancing to Gangnam Style and a miserly rich man being shamed in front of a crowd of applauding strangers was posted to Reddit, where it was roundly mocked. Over the years, Oppa Homeless Style, as it became known, became an infamous part of the ‘Tumblr canon,’ a widely-acknowledged example of the absurdity of a platform at the time famed for hosting naïve teens and ‘social justice warriors’ (a term used by people who think opposing social injustice and oppression is a bad thing, for some reason. (Read...)
Removing cookie-based tracking from this website
I’ve removed gaug.es visitor counting from this website, for the following reasons:
this blog receives nowhere near the number of hits necessary to justify it; although I trust gaug.es to be less invasive than (e.g.) Google Analytics, there’s still no good reason to really be tracking what kind of devices people are using and where they’re coming from—even if it’s anonymous. The double advantage of this is that there are now literally no cookies on this website, and therefore, there is no need for a cookie warning any more. (Read...)